January is a trough on almost everyone’s emotional graph --it’s dark and cold with dark, cold months flanking either side; devilish flu viruses run rampant; all the money has disappeared into Christmas -- but the last three years I’ve spent my Januaries in London and I’ve learned there’s one bright light to look forward to: The London International Mime Festival.

Mime?! Yes. Mime?!! Absolutely. Please reject the mental images you have of the standing-still artists who line the riversides of major cities, and instead broaden out your personal definition of the word so that it tallies, roughly, with ‘communication through movement’. So communicating that you’re trapped by the walls of an invisible box is mime, but that -- and other clichés like walking into a fierce invisible wind, or trying to move an immoveable suitcase -- were actually developed as exercises to train mimes in the classic skills (as taught and propounded by Marcel Marceau). That stuff can actually be funny and mindbending if its done well (which is why Marcel ended up appearing in the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou), but it’s only one school of the art of mime, with another branch being the Lecoq School (an actual school, in Paris, founded by Jacques Lecoq) which works with a broader vocabulary of mask, song and ensemble movement.

And, actually, pushing the horizons out even further, the Mime Festival isn’t just mime -- it’s circus and devised theatre and puppetry and lecture performance and dance, and a hundred other things contained most comfortably by the term physical/visual theatre. The taxonomy of describing these things can get a little tricky, and most of the productions at the Festival actually cross three or four disciplines. One of my favourite ever mash-ups was a multimedia solo butoh streetdance trilogy by Hiroaki Umeda, a piece that doubled Umeda with a projected digital avatar who would mirror his movements or else react according to a minutely evolved vocabulary of response. The same year (2008) sculptor Miquel Barceló and movement specialist Josef Nadj collaborated to produce a piece of live sculpture performance where they worked with a great thick wall of wet clay set in the centre of the Barbican’s main stage.

Other memorable highlights from the past few years have been a rare UK visit from master puppeteer and illusionist Philippe Genty, who staged a dreamscape of fleeting images, beautiful and disturbing and strange, through which the main character was pushed and spun; two pitch-perfect clown shows from French company Les Petit Travers, one of which saw the stage flooded with water for the slow-building comic climax; a piece of ‘visual poetry’ from Aurélien Bory that used its cast to enact dramas and narratives that revolved around constructing and breaking down systems from massive triangular blocks based on the pieces of the ancient Chinese Tangram puzzle; and a circus double act matching a Chinese pole artist with a rollerskating jazz musician (he had a cello with a wheel instead of a spike…).

For 2010 the Festival is looking as rich as ever. The Chinese pole guy returns (without the rollerskating musician this time); Russian legends BlackSkyWhite for the third time import their own brand of nightmarish insectile physical theatre; a piece from Pathosformel spends its 25 minutes doing nothing more than impressing images onto an illuminated white screen; and a show by Les Ateliers du Spectacle combines seven short vignettes in the style of puppet and mechanical theatre. The show I’m most excited to see though is Ockham’s Razor’s The Mill. They’re a brilliant circus company working with pieces of custom equipment (for their last trilogy: an aerial raft made from scaffolding; a trapeze-like frame; and a long rope running over two pulleys instead of hanging from a fixed point) and for The Mill they’ve built a giant aerial wheel from wood and steel. Worth a spin.